BRATTLEBORO — Five area towns have received a combined $38,596 to help with upcoming planning projects.
The infusion is part of $447,723 in municipal planning grants announced Dec. 17 by the state Department of Economic, Housing and Community Development. The grants are intended to assist 46 communities around Vermont in planning for growth and development, revitalizing cities and towns, and helping protect communities from floods.
The department selected projects from a pool of requests from 61 communities. The five local projects are as follows:
• Dummerston - $8,000 to help update the Town Plan and zoning bylaws to address community needs along the Route 5 and Route 30 rural commercial corridors.
• Grafton - $8,000 to update the Town Plan and Hazard Mitigation Plan to include river corridor planning and policies to address flood resiliency.
• Putney - $8,000 to update its Town Plan to include recommendations from the rural district analysis and visualizing density study and incorporate current demographic and mapping data.
• Rockingham - $7,996 to create a new design review guide for its designated downtown district and to assist the town Planning Commission and property owners who seek to make changes to their properties.
• Wardsboro - $6,600 to update its town plan to incorporate stronger policies on flood resiliency, and to develop strategies for buy-outs of flood damaged properties.
The Windham Regional Commission assisted towns with these grants, but WRC Executive Director Chris Campany said that the real work took place “among town planning commissioners and the citizens of the towns. The vision and policies of plans, bylaws, and other planning tools such as design review guides have to come from the citizens of the towns themselves to have real meaning and to be successfully implemented.”
Campany called the municipal planning grant program, which has provided more than $9.1 million to cities and towns across Vermont since 1998, “an incredibly valuable resource for municipalities” that “should not be taken for granted” in a time of tight state budgets.
“In my opinion, town plans will become increasingly important guides for a host of town activities, including the development of town budgets and capital improvement planning, as resources from state and federal government become tighter,” Campany added. “Because they're developed by and for the towns in question, plans can identify development and public investment priorities in the near and long term.”